Geek of the Week: Matthew Hodgson

Who’s ready for Geek of the Week? We are, and today will prove to be an exciting one! Before we get to the winner, let it be known that this person was nominated several months ago. We were impressed from the moment we looked into this nominee. Why? Because this person took on a serious open source project, a nonprofit one no less, and it is something spectacular. So without further ado, this week’s Geek of the Week is Matthew Hodgson, Co-founder and Technical Lead of Matrix.org.
Matrix.org’s aim is to fix the problem of fragmented IP-communications between devices, people and services, and make them as seamless and interoperable as possible. While, it can be used for cases like VoIP, IoT, instant messaging as well as fixing the missing link in WebRTC signalling, its real potential and ultimate mission is to be a generic messaging and data synchronization system for the web – allowing anyone and anything to easily communicate securely, maintaining full conversation history with no single points of control or failure.
Great – just another open source project, right? Not exactly. Matrix.org enables any developer (it’s all on Github) to easily create and host their own feature-rich real-time communication apps that openly interoperate with one another, or add such features to an existing service whilst building on the Matrix community of users. Existing communication services can also easily join in and integrate with the Matrix ecosystem, extending their reach while participating in this collaborative effort to break down the walls between communication silos.
As for Matthew himself: he has been building IP telephony solutions for 11 years and juggles Matrix.org with running the Unified Communications line of business within Amdocs (formerly MX Telecom). He has a MA in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge.
Congratulations Matthew!